Books

I’ve written a little over twenty books, depending on how you count (and when you ask). The majority are self-published, while a handful are published by Obverse Books.

All of the self-published books are available in hardback, and some also in paperback, from my Lulu page. All are also available in paperback from Amazon. The links below to my self-published books are “Universal Book Links” which will take you to my books on your preferred platform.

(As well as those linked below, I have a few standalone short stories available as ebooks. There are so many of these, and they change so frequently, that it’s pointless listing them here.)

Self-Published Books

Fiction

The Basilisk Murders

“Was this going to be the end? I wondered as I sprinted down yet another flight of stairs. Was I going to get caught, and get killed, by a geek serial killer?”

When Sarah arrives at a tech conference she’s meant to be covering for her magazine, she thinks it’ll be a few days away from her marriage problems on a tropical island. Instead, she’s surrounded by sleazy men who want to build a computer God, thousands of miles from home and her wife. She hates where she is, and the people who are around her.

But when someone starts killing those people off, Sarah has to investigate. What is the Basilisk? Who is committing the murders? Why is everyone talking about blackmail? And why is everyone drinking fish?

Surrounded by Russian billionaires, gropey bloggers, alt-right computer scientists, and philosophy professors, can Sarah solve the murders and win back her wife before the Singularity? And can she do it without having to deal with her racist ex-girlfriend?

Part cozy mystery, part technothriller, part biting satire, The Basilisk Murders is a hilarious, gripping, story of irrational rationality, staying kind in a hostile world, and building a better sandcastle.

The Glam Rock Murders
Sarah Turner’s not a fan of seventies rock, but a job’s a job, and when she gets an assignment writing copy for the reunion tour of the legendary glam rock band The Cillas, she decides she’ll try to have fun and make the best of it. But when the band and their associates start dying, Sarah is once again drawn into a murder investigation. What is the big secret that lies at the centre of the Cillas’ success, and why will none of the band members talk about their past honestly?

A witty, suspenseful, story of glam rock, fandom, and secrets, The Glam Rock Murders is a blockbuster that’ll make you want to clap your hands and stamp your feet.

Destroyer
When Rudolph Hess flew to Britain, he was on a secret mission — to give Nazi spies in Britain the secrets of an occult ritual that would win the war for the Germans.
With the fate of the world at stake, Alan Turing, Dennis Wheatley, and Ian Fleming have to find the occultists and stop them. But what is Aleister Crowley’s involvement? And how can they decode the ritual in time?
“an intriguing adventure”: Fortean Times

Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief
When Holmes is called away, Watson is left to assist a client with a uniquely horrible problem. Can Watson solve the mystery of the scarlet neckerchief before his client is murdered?

Doctor John H Watson was the companion and biographer of Sherlock Holmes for many decades, but here for the first time is proof of the good Doctor’s own deductive abilities.

What if the singularity was brought about by social media gaming?
Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?
What should you do if you accidentally defame a werewolf?
Are physicists keeping the secret of time travel to themselves?
And is it possible to have people agree with you too much?
These and other questions are answered in the ten science fiction and fantasy stories found inside.

Contains the short stories:
Jeeves And The Singularity
Monologue
The Shakespeare Code
Occupational Elf
Bubble Universe
Print The Legend
Boltzmann And Boltzwomann
The Singularity
Free Will And Testament
Rite Of Passage

Non-Fiction: MusicThe Beach Boys on CD: Volumes one through three
A massive three-book set, critically examining every track the Beach Boys recorded, together or separately, from 1961 through 2015. Volume one covers the Capitol years, 1961-69; volume two covers from 1970 through to Dennis’ death in 1983; while volume three covers everything from 1985’s The Beach Boys through to 2015’s Brian Wilson and Friends DVD.

Preservation: The Kinks’ Music 1964-74
In the first ten years of their career, the Kinks underwent a creative explosion that was almost unparalleled in popular music.
Starting with simple but potent garage rock tracks like “You Really Got Me”, the band, and lead singer/songwriter Ray Davies, quickly became one of the most idiosyncratic bands of the 60s, recording classic singles like “Days” and “Waterloo Sunset”, and albums like The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time.
In this book, Andrew Hickey analyses every studio recording by the Kinks from their first album in 1964 through to the epic triple concept album Preservation a decade later, looking at what influenced the songs, their subject matter, and the stylistic changes the band went through. Hickey takes a critical look at what makes songs like “Lola”, “Sunny Afternoon” and “All Day And All Of The Night” work, in a book that is full of forthright and sometimes controversial opinion.

California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s
In 1960, a group of young men in California recorded an instrumental single, “Moon Dawg”, and started what would become known as surf music. Within a few years, those young men would have been important parts of records by the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Canned Heat, the Monkees, and many more.

In this book, Andrew Hickey takes a look at the LA pop music scene of the 60s through the lens of its greatest records, loking at the interconnections between seemingly disparate bands and performers. Discover the song Davy Jones of the Monkees wrote about Captain Beefheart, or the member of the Mothers of Invention who named Buffalo Springfield and wrote songs for the Beach Boys.

California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s takes you from the Gamblers’ surf instrumentals, through sunshine pop by the Mamas and Papas and the Beach Boys, to Little Feat and Randy Newman, and shows how all these different artists influenced and inspired each other, in ways that might surprise you…

Monkee Music
Here they come…
In Monkee Music, Andrew Hickey, author of The Beach Boys On CD and California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s, examines the music of Micky, Mike, Davy and Peter from their early bubblegum pop hits with “Last Train To Clarksville” and “I’m A Believer”, through their reinvention as a self-contained band with songs like “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Daydream Believer”, and their psychedelic masterpiece Head, and on all the way into their 2016 album Good Times!

This book contains analysis of every track the Monkees ever released, and is a must for any Monkee Maniacs. The second edition is significantly revised and updated and nearly twice the length of the classic 2011 version, and now includes analyses of the Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, and Hart material, Davy’s first solo album from 1965, Good Times! and more.

Non-Fiction: OtherFifty Stories for Fifty Years: An Unauthorised Guide to the Highlights of Doctor WhoDoctor Who has been a British institution for fifty years, enthralling generations of fans.

In this book, Andrew Hickey takes a personal critical look at one story from every one of those fifty years, starting with the very first story, An Unearthly Child, and ending with 2012’s The Snowmen, and looking not just at TV stories, but at the books, audio adventures, films and comics that are also part of the Doctor Who story.

In doing so, he tries to find those threads that are common to the series, and discover what it is that has made the series last so long, and what the prospects are for the next fifty years.

An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers
In An Incomprehensible Condition, Andrew Hickey examines Grant Morrison’s 2005 comic series Seven Soldiers of Victory, and traces the history of the ideas used.

From Greek myth to hip-hop, from John Bunyan to Alan Turing, from Arius of Alexandria to Isaac Newton, we see how Frankenstein connects to Robert Johnson, what George Bernard Shaw had to say about Bulleteer, and what G.K. Chesterton thinks of I, Spider.

Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
What do Batman, Doctor Who, quantum physics, Oscar Wilde, liberalism, the second law of thermodynamics, Harry Potter fanfic, postmodernism, and Superman have in common?
If your answer to that was “Nothing” then… well, you’re probably right. But in this book Andrew Hickey will try to convince you otherwise. In doing so he’ll take you through:

How to escape from a black hole and when you might not want to
The scientist who thinks he’s proved the existence of heaven and what that has to do with Batman
What to do if you discover you’re a comic-book character
Whether killing your own grandfather is really a bad idea
And how to escape from The Life Trap!

An examination of the comics of Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and Jack Kirby, Doctor Who spin-off media, and how we tell stories to each other, Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! tells you to look around you and say:

Welcome to the Multiverse: An Unauthorised Examination of Grant Morrison’s Multiversity
Andrew Hickey, author of An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, takes a brief, discursive, tour through the many worlds of Grant Morrison’s Multiversity series.
Not authorised in any way by DC Comics, this is not a guidebook, and not annotations. Rather, it’s a series of essays meditating on the themes of the comic, sometimes with only loose connections. You have been warned…

Head of State
‘When the seventh head speaks, the War will end…’
In 11th century Arabia, Shahrazad tells her final story, on the thousand and second night.
In 19th century Britain, Sir Richard Burton is sent on the most important mission of his life.
In 21st century America, a serial killer is stalking a Presidential campaign.
And the hero has been written out of the novel.
‘”…and the true War will begin.’

The Mind Robber
The Black Archive – a series of book-length looks at single Doctor Who stories from 1963 to the present day.

‘We obey our creator. That is all that can be expected of any character, unless the Master bids us otherwise.’

Season 6 of Doctor Who was a time of transition and experimentation, with a production team wanting to move from one formula – the base under siege that had defined the previous two seasons – and toward another – the more grounded stories of season 7.

No story in the season was more experimental, though, than its second, The Mind Robber. The debut of arguably the series’ most visually inventive director, David Maloney, the story was beset with production problems, including the last-minute addition of an extra episode and the sickness of a principal cast member; yet the creative solutions to these problems lifted the final story from a run- of-the-mill piece of whimsy into one of the series’ finest moments.

Tales of the Great Detectives
The City of the Saved houses every human being who ever lived… but some of its immortal Citizens need more.

For the Remakers, one fiction above all exerts its fascination: a character existing in countless interpretations, many of them now recreated in the flesh and in business together as the Great Detective Agency.

These are their tales.

In the Agency’s annals, the City’s many Sherlock Holmeses solve the Case of the Pipe Dream, experience the Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate and explore the strangely clichéd Mansion of Doom. A Watson falls in love; a Moriarty goes missing; and Holmes comes face-to-face with his arch-nemesis, the sinister Dr Conan Doyle…

Contains my short story “The Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate”, along with great stories by other writers.

The Book of the Enemy
The Great Houses hold chains that bind time and space. They are the Namers and the Makers, of all that is. Their power is incalculable. And they are at War.
But the nature of their Enemy has always been shrouded, in mystery, in enigma, perceived through mirrored labyrinths seemingly constructed as much by the Great Houses as the Enemy. Why?
Perhaps now the secrets of the Enemy can be revealed. Or perhaps not.
Experience the ravaged memories of those who have met them in War.

Contains my short story “The Book of the Enemy”, along with great stories by other writers.

A Target for Tommy
A fan-created charity anthology, put together to raise money for a writer suffering from cancer, containing unofficial Doctor Who stories by many writers who have written for the official range, including Paul Cornell, Paul Magrs, and Una McCormack. Contains my story “The Bogeyman”.

I plan to start writing it when I’ve finished writing my current music book (California Dreaming: The LA Pop Scene of the 60s), which has been a little delayed but should be out this summer.
The previous Beach Boys books have taken me about six months to write, so I’d *guess* it’ll be out for Xmas, but if life gets in the way it might be early next year.

I’m working on volume three at the moment — and have serialised some of the essays in it in draft form on my blog. I’d hoped for a Christmas release this year — see the previous reply on this page — but my health problems became increasingly worse (in the last couple of years I’ve developed hypertension and arthritis, and have also been diagnosed with sleep apnoea — as you can imagine, this is not a good combination for staying focussed ;) ). I’ve also been a little stuck on how exactly to deal with That Lucky Old Sun since Scott Bennett’s conviction this year, which is really the elephant in the room in any discussion of that album right now.
I’d guess it’ll be out in January or February — I have only six proper albums left to do full analyses of (That Lucky Old Sun, A Postcard From California, Reimagines Gershwin, In The Key of Disney, That’s Why God Made The Radio, and No Pier Pressure) plus a bunch of shorter essays on things like live albums, compilations, and so forth — but I’m not going to tempt fate by saying it definitely will. But it’s nearly done — the document is 38000 words long at the moment (the first book is 45,328 words long to give you some idea). I’m sorry this has taken longer than I thought — as you’ll see, there are a few people who’ve been asking about this — but I’m *very* glad that people liked the first two enough to be interested.

Definitely this year. I’m serialising rough drafts of many of the chapters to my blog as they get written (though there’ll be quite a few in the book that aren’t serialised here too). It’s taken longer than I expected because my previous music book (California Dreaming — a book on the LA music scene in the 60s) grew to almost twice the length I expected, and then I had some health problems, but one way or another it *will* be out for Xmas.